New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Michael Woods' Conditionals should have been part of a morecomprehensive book on Philosophical Logic, that was left incomplete.The author died in April 1993, and his Brasenose colleague John Fosteris responsible for the transcription, ordering and editing of thematerial left. The object of this review is the first paperbackedition of Conditionals (2003).

The present book contains the Editor's Preface, by David Wiggins, 8Chapters on conditionals, by Michael Woods, a Commentary by DorothyEdgington, a List of Works Cited, an Obituary by John Ackrill,followed by Michael Woods Curriculum Vitae and the Index.

Conditionals are, as Editor David Wiggins says in his Preface to thisbook, ''one of the oldest, most troublesome questions in logic''. Asit is widely known, it is quite common for us to find problems whentrying to accommodate the description of natural language connectivesto their (presumed) corresponding formal connectives. Naturallanguage connectives do not usually behave exactly the way the formalconnectives do, as it is easy to see when we contrast uses of ''and'',''or'', and ''not'', on the one hand, with predicate calculus formulaecontaining formal conjunction, disjunction and negation, on the other.Conditionals, however, beat them all, and present a sort of acute caseof discrepancy.

Chapter One (The Varieties of Conditionals) presents the problem andintroduces the two types of conditionals, as they are usually known:the so called indicative conditionals, on the one hand, and thesubjunctive, or counterfactual conditionals, on the other. The firstproblem with conditionals is that they seem to be a form of sentencecomposition, but it is very difficult to determine whether the form isa truth-functional one, and if so, what function gives us thetruth-value of the complete sentence, from the truth-values of thecomponent sentences. Besides, conditionals come in assertions, butalso in questions and commands (a fact that is not always taken intoconsideration in other treatments of the subject). Non- assertoricconditionals are postponed to Chapter Seven. Woods also discusses theinadequacy of the terms ''subjunctive'' and ''counterfactual'' forconditionals, and the widespread characterization of thecounterfactual as one that implies the falsity of the antecedent. Hesurveys briefly some of the solutions found in the literature to thequestion of assertibility of conditionals, and introduces his owntaxonomy: those conditionals that are made up of two stand-alonesentences plus the ''If... then...'' connective are the SimpleConditionals, and those that cannot be thus analyzed are called''Counterfactual'' Conditionals, for lack of a better term.

Chapter Two (Theories of Simple Conditionals) develops an expositionof several proposals already mentioned in Chapter one. Briefly,Simple Conditionals may be regarded as always having a truth-value, oras not (or not always) having a truth-value. If Simple Conditionalsare regarded as truth-functional, then they are not always assertible,even in cases when they are true. That is, if we take the logicconditional (also called the material condition, or materialimplication) as the description of the truth- values of the SimpleConditional, then we need another parameter, that of assertibility, toaccount for the divergence between truth and use. At least twoproblems arise in connection with the notion of assertibility: itseems to be especially difficult to state for conditionals, and it isalso difficult to distinguish from the acceptability of the utterancecontaining conditionals. Five theories for handling the matter arethen presented and discussed in a preliminary way. Very briefly, theyare:

i) Simple Conditionals (in natural language) have truth- values in thesame the way material conditions (in formal logic) do, and thedifference between the truth-values of Simple Conditionals and theirassertibility is explained in terms of pragmatics.

(ii) Simple Conditionals have truth-values in the same the waymaterial conditions do, and the difference between truth-value andassertibility is a difference in meaning.

(iii) Simple Conditionals have truth-values, but not always, and donot follow the truth-table for material conditions, but rather:

- when P and Q are both true, ''If P then Q'' is true

- when they are both false, ''If P then Q'' is false

- otherwise, there is no truth-value.

This is a consequence of regarding ''If P then Q'' as a conditionalassertion, that is, an assertion of Q on the condition that P. If Pis not the case, there is no assertion, and no truth-value.

(iv) Simple Conditionals have truth values but are nottruth-functional. The truth of the material condition may benecessary but not sufficient for the truth of the conditional. ''If Pthen Q'' is regarded as a metalinguistic assertion.

(v) Simple Conditionals lack truth-values altogether.

Problems and inadequacies of each theory are also discussed.

Chapter Three (Ramsey's Test and Adam's Hypothesis) is dedicated, asthe titles states, to discussing two approaches already mentioned.Ramsey and later Adams discussed the form ''If P then Q'' as anassertion of Q on the condition that P. Thus, someone accepting thatQ on the condition that P is described as making minimal revisions inhis or her stock of beliefs, and conditionals are then regarded asepistemic. The notion of minimal revision, and the calculus ofconditional probability are then discussed. According to Woods,Adams's Hypothesis seems to give a better account (better than, forexample, the use of the notion of relevance) of the behavior ofconditionals in certain troublesome cases. The troublesome caseswould be the failure of Simple Conditions to comply with transitivity,contraposition, strengthening of the antecedent, the equivalence of''P or Q'' with ''not If P then Q'', and with modus tollens.

Chapter Four (Simple Conditionals and Truth-Values: Some Proposals)brings a review of what has been studied so far, and narrows down theavailable options for treating Simple Conditionals. Woods discussesAdams's Hypothesis still further, and also Lewis's epistemic approach,Jackson's notion of robustness, and Grice's pragmatic approach.

Chapter Five (Conditionals and Possible Worlds). In Chapter one,Woods denied the usual characterization of ''Counterfactual''Conditionals as those that imply the falsity of the antecedent. Inthis chapter, he applies a widespread approach to counterfactuality(possible worlds), due mainly to the work of Lewis and Stalnaker, tothe analysis of Simple Conditionals. Woods discusses the apparatus ofpossible worlds, the problem of ordering and selecting worlds, and thesolutions given by Lewis and Stalnaker. The application of possibleworlds to Simple Conditions gives a good explanation to a wide varietyof cases, but brings several other problems into the field, like theadequacy of the notion of similarity between worlds, and whether thechoice of worlds should be guided by causal laws (as proposed byBennett) and not by similarity. Even if we accept an approach basedon possible worlds, it cannot give a proper explanation to the reasonswe have for using conditionals the way we do. It does not seempossible to explain why the form of Simple Conditional should beattached to the meaning it has, and it seems to be misguided to applya possible world treatment to Simple Conditionals.

Chapter Six (Compound Conditionals and Truth-Values) examines fourtypes of case in which a conditional is embedded in a larger sentence.Woods presents his arguments for preferring to regard conditionals asconditional assertions, lacking truth-values. The four cases are:

(i) a conditional consequent

(ii) a conditional with disjunctive antecedents

(iii) a disjunction of conditionals

(iv) a conditional with a conditional antecedent, and the negation ofa conditional, which present the greatest problems.

Chapter Seven (Theory of Simple Conditionals; Non- AssertoricConditionals) states the two remaining approaches for conditionals:

(i) Simple Conditionals do not have truth-values. They are used tomake conditional assertions

(ii) Simple Conditionals do have truth-values, but they are relativeto the epistemic state of the speaker.

The second view, however, may be regarded as leading to greatercomplexity and not offering any advantages in turn, and the authorprefers to consider Simple Conditionals as lacking truth-values. Theyare used to make conditional assertions, and one extra advantage ofthis point of view is the possibility of describing non-assertoricconditionals (questions and commands) as parallel cases.

Chapter Eight (Sketch of a Theory of ''Counterfactual'' Conditionals)offers an account of the ''Counterfactual'' Conditionals in terms ofepistemic states of the speaker, as it was already presented inchapters three and four, concerning Simple Conditionals. Thisapproach should allow us to account for several types of sentencesthat are not usually grouped with the ''Counterfactual'' type. Itaccommodates the problems of temporal asymmetry, ordering of worlds,choosing of worlds, and also the detailed interplay between the tenseof verb used and the interpretation of the sentence. The concludingremarks stress once more the fact that even if possible worlds areadequate to describe the form of this kind of conditionals, theycannot help us to explain the use we make of conditionals, and givetoo much attention to ''fantasies'' devoid of more immediate practicalreasons.

The Commentary by Dorothy Edgington takes up roughly one third of thebook. It is a detailed response to several of the topics of the book,providing, as Dorothy Edgington says, background for some of the ideaspresented, extra arguments in favor of some positions, and even somedisagreement (concerning the treatment of ''will'' sentences).

Comments

An obvious drawback of this book is that it was left incomplete, andthe text is rather packed, with a lot of theory pressed together. Atleast one section is incomplete: Chapter seven, on compoundconditionals. Also, the titles of the chapters do not strictlycorrespond to the subjects presented in them: the discussion goes farbeyond what is mentioned in the title, and that is a littlemisleading. And the reader, however sympathetic to the cause, couldprobably use some more examples, for the subject is indeed a hard one.Then there are the good aspects: for a book that was left incomplete,this is an exceptionally clear and well-written one, especially one onsuch a demanding subject. Each new chapter (apart from the first)begins with a summary of the ideas discussed in the preceding one, andends with a sketch of what will be presented in the next, thus makingit a very readable essay, and not at all a collection of loosetheories. For the beginner in the field, the footnotes provide a goodintroduction to the literature on the subject. Also on the plus sideare the Editor's notes and the Commentary. In this rather small book,then, Michael Woods managed to present us with a good map of the area:a definition of conditionals, a sketch of the reasons why they are sodifficult to deal with, a survey of the main theories proposed to sortthem out, and some fresh proposals of his own, which is reason enoughfor us to read and enjoy his book.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Maria Leonor Santos teaches Linguistics at Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil, and is now working for her thesis on conditionals (in Brazilian Portuguese) at Federal University of Santa Catarina. Her main interests are Logic, Lexical Semantics, and History of Linguistics.